Pxtl

Pxtl, 7 godzin temu

The animation and aesthetic is amazing and I like the music but … what’s the gameplay? I confess I got a little disappointed when it shifted to platformer perspective.

Pxtl, miesiąc temu

Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.

Pxtl, miesiąc temu

And I don’t make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:

It is disappointing that we’re currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I’m angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.

Pxtl, 4 miesiące temu

God damn how is it that Sega has never released a Sonic Adventure-style game with that kind of online multiplayer? It’s so freaking obvious and yet we’ve never seen it.

Some of the gameplay mechanics look a bit… unnecessary? Like riding on vehicles, at least at speed. And I’ve always thought the Sonic Adventure rail grinding was tedious. But still overall it looks like a fun adaptation of the 3D sonic gameplay albeit with a slightly dated-looking art style.

Pxtl, 5 miesięcy temu

Civ Beyond Earth has the neat approach that it replaces the old “build a spaceship to alpha Centauri” with three different technological endings each with different moral implications. The game is about human transcendence so any ending is going to be about changing humanity.

The problem is that the game itself is not one of the better entries in the Civ series otherwise.

Pxtl, 5 miesięcy temu

Yes, many many many years ago. Beyond Earth is the palest of pale imitation.

Pxtl, 5 miesięcy temu

Trial balloon.

This character is the thin edge of a very large wedge.

Pxtl, 6 miesięcy temu

Did they miss the memo on Armored Core 6? If they’re bringing back a Dreamcast franchise, it’s Virtual On

Pxtl, 6 miesięcy temu

Tomb Raider 2013 would only pop up the hud when you did something that involved it, by default the GUI was fully hidden.

The ultimate original “no hud FPS” was Jurassic Park Trespasser, where checking your health involved looking down at a tattoo on your breast.

Pxtl, 6 miesięcy temu

Problem there is the gas cost of blockchain is too high. Recording transactions on chain is expensive. It might be worthwhile for full game transfers, but for cosmetics? I doubt that.

Pxtl, 6 miesięcy temu

Yes, but crypto keys recorded with an owner in a public ledger, so there’s a clear single owner.

Pxtl, 6 miesięcy temu

What blockchain doesn’t have high transaction costs once it scales up to large usage? Fundamentally blockchains are about hyper-redundant indestructable storage with expensive costs for writing to that storage to prevent flooding it with garbage. The most mature and sophisticated blockchain that doesn’t involve burning down a forest to solve sudokus is the Ethereum network, which is probably the one to point to when we’re talking about a large blockchain, and that’s one that uses the subcurrency of “gas” to model paying for recording into that ledger.

Are there any blockchains that could handle transaction volumes on the scale of a game-store like Gog or Epic (much less Steam) without putting non-trivial prices on writing the transactions to the ledger?

Pxtl, 6 miesięcy temu

Opens tab

Anime game with many characters with different gameplay? Sure I’ll take a look.

Zenless Zone Zero is an upcoming free-to-play urban fantas…

Closes tab.

Pxtl, 6 miesięcy temu

We all have hundreds of games that are $0, it’s called “all the games in your steam account you already own that you haven’t played yet”.

Pxtl, 6 miesięcy temu

Deep Rock is good at letting you ignore what you don’t care about. I’ve never needed a wiki for it. It’s just fun and silly co op action, with massive complexity mostly about trivial things.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

This is why the digital good I buy the most of is music. MP3s are just dumb files. There’s no subscription fees, no DRM. Nothing but digital watermarks. The “service” is the ability to redownload and stream the songs that I’ve purchased on other devices, but I also store the raw files on my fileserver.

Now, the challenge for the vendor is that I can also just as easily pirate these same files.

And yet somehow I still buy.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Large Corporate Landlords: There’s a perception that these entities buy up substantial amounts of property, making it difficult for individuals to purchase a home due to increased prices and limited supply.

People keep looking for the bogeyman here but this is one where that’s too facile. Rents in Canada have skyrocketed, and REITs rent out their properties. Sure, they rent them out as expensive as they can, they’re jerks. But they’re profiteering off of the shortage of rental properties. And if they’ve got a crapload of property, and they’re profiting from the shortage… well they’re not really the cause of the shortage when they’re offering a lot to rent, are they? They’re profiteering from it, but they’re not causing it. If there was truly endless money buying up everything and then renting it out, prices to buy would climb, but prices to rent would plummet, and that’s obviously not happening.

You want to look at the cause? Look at people who prevent new housing from getting built. Petty bureaucrats. Wealthy NIMBY neighbours.

And yes, as much as it goes against Canadian values: if you’ve got more immigrants than you’ve got new housing, you’re going to run out of homes, and the people who have homes can price them as high as they want because everybody needs a roof.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

Yes but the typical gameclip set up where you have the DS-style setup of the controller at the bottom and the screen at the top is surprisingly uncomfortable because of how top-heavy that is.

Too bad phone makers have given up on experimenting with form factor. Just an endless array of oddly-sized rectangles, but not quite consistent-enough to make gameclips feasible.

Also I’ve hit problems with gamepad+Bluetooth audio giving my game controller bad audio latency. Had to switch to wired audio.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

Hey, I liked NES ghostbusters. You got to design your own car, bust ghosts, and worry about your business’ finances. Of course I haven played it in over 30 years so I imagine the rose-colored glasses might be a problem.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

I mean I remember grinding for loot and levels in FF1.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

I mean I like Jeff but the OW1 eras of pretty bad gameplay and pretty long time waiting fixes happened on his watch. He designed a crazy fun game, but I think his stewardship in making it stay balanced and various and fun once you get good at it was a bit more lacking.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

Yup. And Overwatch PVE has never been good… I know a lot of players were pumped for it, but we’ve never seen any evidence they had a good plan for how to make it fun. They had lots of zany ideas for powers and RPG elements and whatnot, but all the PVE content for Overwatch released so far has been mediocre-to-bad.

Imho telling the story through PVE has never been a good idea for OW. It’s not a PVE game. Finding some way to tell the story in PVP, even with massive ludonarrative disconnect, would have been better.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

Have you ever considered not working for a giant corporation to fix their products for them for free?

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

You probably did use it if you’re a nerd under its old name, Wikia, back before it got enshittified.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

I mean the conspiracy theory side of it is questionable but the basic facts are true:

1. Wikipedia has a policy against non-notable things. They were always embarrassed by the fact that every detailed version of every Pokemon had its own page, whereas the pages for important historical events were stubs. The WP:Notability standard has been the bane of every garage band and open-source game and DVD extra that was booted off the site because trivia cannot meaningfully be checked, trivia that otherwise allows hoax articles to live on.
2. Jimbo Wales decided to profit off of the desire to create fan-encyclopedias or even complete nonsense (like, for example, Penny Arcade’s Elemenstor Saga wiki, which details the history of a novel series and anime and cardgame that never existed) by creating Wikia, the for-profit Wikipedia that had no standards about what you could put on it besides legality. Just create your own Wikia and run it with an iron fist.

Now, the question is whether he did (1) in order to drive profitable users to (2). That’s where the conspiracy question lives. And I tend to assume good faith. People’s morals erode over time, not all at once. Since both (1) and (2) are totally legitimate, but profit motive encourages the millimetre-by-millimetre enshittification of Wikia into the horrible thing it is today.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

To me this seems like solving the wrong problem. Ever since Souls, too many games get obsessed about making their boss encounters challenging but making the main level gameplay just tedious filler. AC6 missions often feel like that. Imho the correct action is to refine the gameplay and figure out your core loop, instead of having massive difficulty spikes.

This is the gameplay equivalent of the “Whisper and Explosion” problem.

Pxtl, 7 miesięcy temu

Crack Dot Com’s “Abuse”. Greatest run-and-gun platformer ever.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

Why not both .gif

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

I’d wager technical debt is the reason. It’s no secret that Bethesda’s engine is bad. Bad code makes it harder to do bug-fixes, because it’s harder to find the root cause of things and the risks of having accidental side-effects is far higher. There’s only so many hacks and emergency fixes you can slap into a codebase before it becomes a house of cards that collapses if you breathe on it the wrong way.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

“How can I make this about me?”

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

I don’t get it. The game looked completely unremarkable. Even its big hook of having some microgravity stuff was barely present in the trailers. This was their big play? Really?

a “total lack of direction” around the game, with one contributor stating many members of the leadership team were “asleep at the wheel but they never seemed to lose their jobs”. The same source noted an engine change and “not committing to doing anything adventurous with the game” were all part of Hyenas’ ultimate demise.

Yeah, we can tell.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

Well yeah, but there’s lots of ways to make that more interesting than just “set gravity really low in this zone”.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

It’s funny, even though mechanically they’re the same, different games make it feel different.

Like, if a game presents them as special objectives or something, that seems okay. Extra stars for extra achievemnt? Fine.

But when they say “you finished the level… I rate you a D+” that’s kind of a kick in the nards.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

I dunno, company that sells digital content for young people buys company that sells other digital content for young people. I can see the synergy there. Epic Games Store and Bandcamp aren’t that far apart.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

Very yes. I like Lemmy but there’s a lot of “corporation bad giv updoot” here.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

They also bought 7digital.com this year, which is a site I sometimes buy MP3s from since they have a better selection of mainstream record-label stuff than Bandcamp (no Amazon MP3s here in Canada).

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines

How so? I’ve seen complaints about the C# API and some similar challenges, but nothing show-stopping. Obviously you won’t be making a AAA game in it, but for indies it looks like a decent option.

The dirty secret of software is that any given user-facing OSS application is about 15 years behind the closed-source competitors, but the fact is that most software was good-enough 15 years ago and the industry has spent the last 15 years on cloudifying and A-B testing and GUI revamping and other stuff that isn’t basic functionality.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

Counterstrike predates that as a gameplay mechanic.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

Okay but PS1 games were similar prices and printing CDs is cheap.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

F zero 99?

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

I know it’s lazy as hell, but I’m shocked how much I’m enjoying it in spite of that. Its real flaw is the shortage of courses, one that probably won’t get much better because the OG F-Zero didn’t have much variety either.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

It’s incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.

I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.

But at the same time, they’re cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.

So we uncritically give them all the power.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

Exactly. Steam is a load-bearing member. After seeing what happened to Twitter, Reddit, Unity, Wikia, etc. it’s reasonable to think ahead. If Valve gets enshittified that’s basically the end of PC gaming.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

P2P and player-owned dedicated servers need to come back. This “everything runs on the cloud” stuff is so bad on so many levels.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

Exactly. I wonder if it’s possible to make a commercial game that’s fully decentralized. Sell the licenses as NFTs, use activitypub for the masterserver so you just toot out your games, release the game and dedicated server as free binaries. I hate NFTs but they’d be more consumer-rights friendly than the current approach of steam owns everything.

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

That’s the thing about breaking trust, you lose the benefit of the doubt on everything else you do, too.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett

Pxtl, 8 miesięcy temu

Yes. Hated it. The flying mechanics were joyless, the plot was tedious, the weaker enemy units were harmless filler, and there were too many overly-scripted fights.